23rd February: Hokkaido – Notsuke National Highway

Here we are still in farmlands near Notsuke Bay with the mountains of Central Hokkaido in the background. We are on our way from Notsuke Bay towards the town of Utoro, across the base of the Shiretoko Pensinula in North-Eastern Hokkaido and mainly along the Notsuke National Highway.

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Trees in the snow, with a moving camera.

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(Click to explore much larger image)

(Click to explore much larger image)

Here we are still not quite into the national park. The two largest mountains on view will be Mt Shibetsu on the left and Mt Shari on the right. The last two images are many images combined. Clicking on either of them will take to a much larger full-screen image that you can zoom into and out of. There’s another one later in this post, as indicated.

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Here we are at a river by the side of the road that flows in some places and is frozen over in others. We have gone over the Konpoku Pass and are nearly out of the national park on the other side of the peninsula. I don’t have any images from the middle of the National Park, probably because there was nowhere for the bus to stop.

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Now we are out of the national park and here are some silver birches, planted as boundaries to paddocks.

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(Click to explore much larger image)

A couple more views looking back over farmland towards the mountains.

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The Japanese can be very thoughtful. Sometimes people may have difficulty knowing where the sun is so there are big arrows suspended over the middle of the road to let them know. I expect they also have the dual use of showing where the road is when the snow is deep.

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Sometimes you see the most curious things. We had stopped on the other side of the road for a meal on the outskirts of the town of Shari and were only a few kilometres from the coast. The van must have fallen over so unexpectedly that the reflection didn’t have time to change. Assistance arrived about ten minutes later.